Milk: Every Food Safety Answer

This page pulls together the 13 milk answers on the site: how long it keeps, whether you can freeze it, how long it can be left out, what the date on the label means, where it stands in pregnancy and what applies while breastfeeding. The table gives the short answer for each; the page behind each row gives the full reasoning, the source and the exceptions.

In pregnancy: Yes — pasteurised milk is safe and positively good for you during pregnancy. Only unpasteurised (raw) milk should be avoided.

Worth knowing: Pasteurisation is a brief heat treatment and doesn't make milk sterile — bacteria that survive it slowly multiply even at fridge temperature, which is why milk is dated rather than given an indefinite shelf life. That same vulnerability is also why milk is one of the few fridge staples worth freezing: at -18°C those bacteria stop multiplying entirely, pausing the clock for up to 3 months (expect some fat separation on thawing — a good shake usually fixes it).